That’s a wrap for Day 2 at Davos. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani made his pitch for his country’s “new face, post-elections.” Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and James Dimon expressed reservations, if not outright hostility, to bitcoin, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said Europe is now “stable” and “poised for growth.”

Good morning. Less than an hour to go until Hasan Rouhani steps up for his grandstand speech to the Davos elite-masses. At one time, the Iranian president might have seen this as a cloud-free chance to reset trading attitudes to the country, after the nuclear/sanctions deal. But this week’s brouhaha over Syrian peace talks may have taken the shine off somewhat.

“Since it agreed to a deal with Western powers over closer international scrutiny of its nuclear program, Iranian oil officials have been on a charm offensive, eager to get Western oil companies interested again in Iranian oil fields,” says Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. “Iran needs foreign capital and technology to help exploit the mature fields. But executives—particularly American ones—have been reticent about any public embrace, for now.”

That means Rouhani is very keen to meet Western oil execs, Faucon says.

“Iran has never desired a nuclear weapon and never desired to have one in the future,” he said in translated remarks.

He said Iran has a “serious will” to reach an agreement on the nuclear program with the so-called P5-plus-1 powers, which are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S. — plus Germany.

Rouhani stressed several times that Iran’s nuclear efforts are dedicated to only peaceful purposes, such as for energy and medical services, and therefore his government “will not accept discrimination” against Iran compared with other countries. He vowed to carry out the program within all international laws and regulations.

“The people are not willing to give up their peaceful technology,” Rouhani said.

J.P. Morgan CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon said in an interview with CNBC on the sidelines in Davos that the “sun, the moon and the stars are lining up” for the U.S. economy, creating a better environment for the companies.

“Corporate America’s in excellent shape,” he said in the interview. “Six million more Americans are working. Americans are wealthier in their homes, their 401(k)s. And government is doing no damage.”

“I think those things are going to line up, that it’s possible that we’re just going to start to strengthen as a company, that investors will be looking for opportunities,” he added. “Remember, companies want to expand.”

This morning, we had Iranian leader Hasan Rouhani downplaying his country’s nuclear-arms ambitions and stressing it wants better relationships with other nations – with the idea Iran could become one of the world’s 10 largest economies. As part of this push, Rouhani is telling oil execs the country will have a “new, attractive investment model for oil contracts”, Reuters is reporting.

“It was an impressive presentation,” one of the execs reportedly said.

Here at #WEF#Davos lot of interest in Iran as its president delivers interesting speech – suddenly businesses talking about its potential

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew offered up a rosy outlook on the U.S. economy — as long as Congress doesn’t mess it up — while simultaneously pouring cold water on the notion that Iran’s economy is set to spring ahead after reaching a deal with Western powers to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.

In an interview with CNBC, Lew reiterated the contents of a letter he sent to congressional leaders a day earlier warning that the government would likely have to begin taking extraordinary measures to avoid default by Feb. 7 and would exhaust its ability to avoid default by late February.

Lew said it was crucial that Congress avoid “another self-inflicted wound” to growth after last year’s government shutdown. Meanwhile, Lew said conditions appeared to be “queued up” for strong U.S. growth in 2014.

Confidence and growth projections continue to rise along with confidence indicators, he said. Construction has yet to hit on all cylinders, which could provide a further boost to growth.

Lew, however, went out of his way to pour cold water on the claim by Iranian President Hasan Rouhani in a Davos speech earlier Thursday that the country could soon become one of the world’s 10 largest economies in the next decade.

World powers relaxed some sanctions against Iran after the country scaled back its nuclear program, setting the stage for further talks. Lew said sanctions served to get Iran’s attention and that a more substantial easing of restrictions would come only if Iran continues to make progress toward ensuring that it is incapable of producing nuclear weapons.

In other words, there is not yet an “open for business” sign in Iran, Lew said.

London mayor Boris Johnson talks about the city’s real-estate market after the Olympic Games in 2012 in an interview with Bloomberg and says the U.K. capital is in a “situation where huge sums of money are coming into the city.”

“We had a very big post-Olympic success. London is seeing a huge increase in property values because of international investors wanting to buy this new asset class of London property. That is a great strength for us, but also a problem, because it means we have to build hundreds of thousands more homes to help Londoners living in the capital,” he said in the interview.

London’s housing market has been in the spotlight in recent months after sharp increases in property prices in the fall spurred concerns of a housing bubble.

On Wednesday, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned that “military expansion” in Asia needs to be kept in check — naming no names, but taken as a clear warning about China’s ambitions in the region. And it was Abe who got the whole “World War 1″ thing started, in comments to journalists. (More details in this blog.)

In his appearance earlier in the Davos day, Iran’s leader Hasan Rouhani emphasized the country’s desire to build bridges with Western nations, with one eye on becoming a top 10 world economy. But elsewhere in Switzerland, the first day of a major conference on peace in Syria saw bitter divisions and angry speeches, the BBC said. More grist to Roubini’s mill, perhaps.

Don’t expect to pay for those expensive Davos cheeseburgers with bitcoins just yet. And if some of the Davos elite are any indication, the cryptocurrency won’t be displacing Swiss francs or any other major currency soon.

In an interview with CNBC, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon said the extremely volatile bitcoin, which is electronically “mined” via complex algorithms, is a “terrible store of value, it could be replicated over and over, it doesn’t have the standing of a government, and, honestly, from a lot of what I’ve read … a lot of it is being used for illicit purposes.” Read more about Dimon’s bitcoin comments.

That’s a big problem for banks that are pressured by governments to “know their customer,” said Dimon. He predicted bitcoin would eventually be made to follow the same standards as other payment systems and “that will probably be the end of them.”

“From the government’s perspective, we have to make sure [bitcoin] does not become an avenue to funding illegal activity or to funding activities that have malign purposes like terrorist activities,” he said.

Netanyahu said many countries in the region share Israel’s concerns about a nuclear Iran and they “understand that these are a change of words [by Iran] with unchanging deeds. They understand that Iran remains aggressive, that it supports terror, that it participates in slaughter in Syria, that it’s pursing the development of ballistic missiles and plutonium for nuclear weapons … We all wish there was a real change in Iran. We don’t see that.”

Goldman Sachs Group CEO Lloyd Blankfein, in a panel discussion on competition and collaboration between the China, Europe and the U.S., said the European economy appears to have pulled back from the brink.

“The issues about Europe were borderline existential a couple years ago and they were very severely pessimistic a year ago. Europe has stabilized and I think a lot of terrific work was done by regulators and central bankers … Europe is stabilized and poised for growth,” Blankfein said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is going to contribute to the world economy “probably at or above trend growth,” while a lot of eyes are also on China, he said. And given uncertainties over China, whether or not the country is “up or down 2 percent around its number has more consequence to global GDP than whether the U.S. is half a percent either way from its growth” forecast,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew threw cold Davos snow on suggestions that the Obama White House will compromise with congressional Republicans in order to win an increase in the debt ceiling.

Gerard Baker, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, who interviewed Lew in front of a large audience, began to suggest to the Treasury secretary some possible horse-trading that could end the debt ceiling stalemate, including perhaps some give from Democrats on corporate tax reform.

“Not negotiating means not negotiating,” Lew said flatly. “I am not going to do it indirectly if I won’t do it directly,” he added. Lew has warned congressional leaders that they only have until the end of February to raise the debt limit. “We’ve made it clear that [a debt ceiling increase] is not a lever to extract something from the White House,” he said.

Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney, in a television interview in Davos, appeared to call into question an element of the explicit forward guidance put in place after he took the helm of the central bank last year. The Bank of England in August had pledged not to consider a hike in interest rates until the unemployment fell to 7% — at the time, it didn’t think that would happen until 2016.

But the U.K. unemployment rate has fallen much faster than expected, with data this week showing it at 7.1% in the three months ended in November versus 7.4% in the previous period.

Carney told the BBC that there was “no immediate need to increase interest rates.”